David Kowarsky - Khyros



David Kowarsky

12/14/04

VES 107 – Prof. John Stilgoe

Photo of Luther Coffin’s Logging Camp

The loggers sit in rows on bales of pressed hay, exhibiting a wide range of expressions. The standing man on the left wearing what appear to be suspenders shows a calm disinterest. In the middle of the photo, one man clutches a pipe in his lips and an axe in both hands. His raised eyebrows indicate some sense of surprise or disorientation. The vertically highest person in the picture is the man with a sweater and hat that looks vaguely military, though perhaps this is just a trick of the angles. His expression is one of glee. He stands behind the rows, raising his fist triumphantly. He may well be celebrating some trick he pulled successfully earlier in the day, be it professional or personal. Is his happiness over a successful prank performed upon the overly dour-faced man upon whose hat his other hand rests? Seven of the loggers have their axes in hand; the picture is interrupting work and they are ready to go back. Also, why would the hunter have his snowshoes out and ready? He has just returned from an excursion and wanted to make it into the picture. He’s barely had time to take them off.

When I first saw this picture, I saw many different stories coming together. The facial expressions aren’t posed, everyone brought their own sentiment at the moment to the picture. That being said, there is a clear view of who is part of this logging camp, and who is at this logging camp. The rows of loggers shoulder to shoulder sharply contrast with the two figures standing off to the side, the clerk and the hunter. The two of them seem to have a camaraderie separate from the rest of the camp, perhaps their possession of specialized tools, or unique items gave them some common ground. Some of the loggers are carrying Axes, the tool of their trade, while the clerk carries his watch, the tool of his trade, as “time is money,” and the hunter carries his rifle.

Not precisely apart from or a part of the logging camp society, these two specialists stand together, each with a hand on the rifle. I have put forth the supposition of camaraderie between them partially because the hunter is letting the clerk lean on the rifle, which is the source of the hunter’s livelihood, apart from any monetary value the gun may have. The clerk’s grasp obscures part of the rifle barrel, but you can still see enough to identify the kind of rifle that the hunter wields to within a very small field.

Even had I not been given a date for the photograph, the gun would have been able to provide me with a reasonable estimate. I knew from the shape of the trigger guard and the nearby loop of metal that extended along the bottom of the rifle butt, that I was looking at some kind of lever-action repeating rifle. Repeating is a description of the loading mechanism of the gun in question, and implies the fact that it can hold more than one shot at a time in a magazine, easing reload time for the hunter. This alone allows us to date the picture to after 1860, the approximate date of introduction of the Henry repeater, which earned the moniker from confederate soldiers, “that damn Yankee gun you can load on Sunday and shoot all week.”

This much I recalled from my various classes in American history, but there is much more to learn from this gun. There is a lot you can learn by looking at details. Fortunately, the metal in the rifle stands out very well against the background, allowing one to clearly discern the shape and proportion of the wood portion of the barrel, and the trigger guard. After examining images of many rifles from the time period c. 1894, I believe I have identified the one held by our camp’s hunter as the Winchester 1886 model.

[pic]

Figure 1: Detail of Pg. 39.

[pic]

Figure 2: A Winchester 1886, with detail.

[pic]

Figure 3: Alternate view of an 1886

It is possible that the rifle is from another year’s similarly structured Winchesters. I eliminated earlier Winchesters, including the premiere of this line, the Henry, based on the proportions I observed between trigger guard and the lever pull, and the tapering of the barrel that, while obscured by the grasp of the hunter and clerk, is clearly visible. The perspective of the photo has the gun tilted slightly outwards, i.e. we don’t have a straight-on profile, which makes some of my precision proportion judgments difficult. It also obscures the appearance of the loading gate, which is a feature often used to make fine model differentiations. I can accurately state that the hunter and clerk are leaning on a Winchester lever action repeating rifle, one of models 1873, 1876, 1886, 1892, or 1894. This is as far as the purely visual evidence gets us. However, a survey of the history and development of these repeating arms leads me to believe that the rifle in the photo mist be at least as late as the 1886 model.

So why is the hunter using this gun? The repeating rifles Winchester manufactured beginning in 1873 represented the pinnacle of achievement in rifle technology up to that point in time. The most important of these features is the efficient lever action used in reloading, which while often associated with the Henry repeater, has a longer and more nuanced history.

Understanding the importance of the repeating rifle requires a recapitulation of shoulder-arms technology. Aside from reliability concerns, and weather sensitivity, the major problem with long firearms before the American Civil War was the long loading time. These early “muzzle-loaders,” that is to say, that the ammunition was loaded by pressing it down from the tip of the barrel, were difficult to use, and even a skilled marksman was limited in efficacy by time it took to reload, a laborious process that involved the use of a powder horn, a bag of ammunition, and a ramrod. Powder was poured down the barrel, and then the ramrod was used to cram shot and wadding into the barrel (bore). Often, the powder was first poured from a horn into a special measure to avoid hazardous over-pouring that could result in the weapon blowing up in your face. Here, we see an 18th century flintlock long gun, with a detail of the flintlock ignition.

[pic][pic]

Flintlock ignition technology is important because shoulder-arms for practical military usage began to appear with the refinement of the flintlock ignition technology in the mid 17th century. The technology involved a spring loaded hammer that accelerated a piece of flint held in the jaws to strike a piece of iron, the frizzen, which would make sparks that would ignite a small amount of gunpowder placed in the pan adjacent to the barrel. The resulting flash would spread to the gunpowder in the barrel via a small hole, and the powder in the barrel would explode, causing the expulsion of the shot down the barrel, and presumably to the target.

However, long-arms didn’t start out with incredible accuracy, so you were going to miss a lot more often than you would using one of today’s firearms with comparable skill. A miss also cost you a lot more when you were using a gun like this, because when you didn’t hit, well, back to the powder horn, measure your powder, dump it down (while of course chewing some wadding to give it the proper consistency), then cram the wadding and shot down with your ramrod, put some powder in the pan, cock your hammer back and try again. What’s that? The first shot scared your game and you have nothing like a clear shot any more? In most situations, then, you had one shot, so technology tried to make it a better one.

One way technology improved was the shift from smooth-bored arms to rifle-bored arms. The early long arms had smooth barrels, and the shot was only loosely fit to the diameter so that you could load without forcing the barrel out of shape. Much of the energy generated by the powder explosion was lost when the bullet flew from side to side inside the barrel and often left the barrel at a slightly off angle; this decreased the range and strength of the shot. To remedy this, gunsmiths fashioned barrels that were tighter fits and had helical grooves cut into the inside of the bore, called rifling, which put a radial, gyroscopic spin on the projectile as it sped down the barrel. The stabilizing effect enhanced the accuracy of the weapons, and this change, this rifling is where we get the term “rifle.” The design was meant to be a tighter fit to the projectile, so that there would be less wasted energy; the projectile, when fired, would ideally screw itself through the barrel. Rifling brought out another major deficiency of muzzle-loaded firearms. Each time a bullet traveled along the barrel, it degraded the rifling, and muzzle-loading effectively doubled the wear on the barrel, halving the effective number of shots for which the rifling was intact enough to help. The carbon steel barrel of the time wasn’t often good for more than a thousand shots of shoddy ammunition.

So rifling gave you a better shot, but left you with the time disadvantages of muzzle-loading, and even made the design flaws of muzzle-loading wear and tear even more prominent. Why was muzzle-loading preferred in the first place? Muzzle loading allowed for the simplest construction that required few parts that had to be able to both open and close, and maintain a good seal. The amount of precision in manufacturing guns, particularly ones that had to be mass produced, was simply not at that level yet. Also, muzzle loading with a ramrod was neat, relatively, since powder was generally handled loose, when it was poured straight down the barrel, this prevented spillage. Most importantly, due to the lack of efficient packaging, a soldier needed to compress the bullets, powder, and wadding very tightly, as air gaps resulted in wasted energy, and sometimes destroyed arms. Gravity and the ability to use a ramrod to press straight down prevented this.

Muzzle-loading had become so ingrained into the design of the arms that rather than change this, designers of ammunition started to rebuild the bullets to deal with the design limitation. Now, while hindsight is 20/20, and we now know that the gun design was more in need of change, the designers of the time had a variety of factors to deal with that had them changing ammunition instead. Obviously, it was cheaper to do this, partially because new bullets were going to be produced regardless of when the rifles changed in design; one needs to replace bullets faster one needs to replace rifles. Constant rebuilding left more opportunities to redesign. The other major roadblock was retraining; that is to say, that the procedure of retraining and changing the training program for soldiers to use totally new weapons would be both time consuming and costly, and the benefits of a new design would have to be very substantial in order to justify it.

To make things more efficient without changing the rifle design, bullets were prepackaged with small amounts of powder in paper sleeves which were called cartridges. This prevented overpouring, and streamlined the loading process. Another major change in ammunition was the introduction of the Minie ball for rifled barrels, designed by the French Captain Claude-Etiene Minie, and further refined by American engineers. The transition to shaped bullets rather than spherical shot happened in various forms, but the main advantage that the Minie ball presented over previous bullets was the conical gap at the base. Rifling is most effective when the contoured barrel is in consistent contact with the bullet, to minimize the loss of energy from the exploding powder. The Minie ball is actually smaller than the diameter of the rifling in the barrel, it can be dropped down easily without wearing the rifling down. When the gun is fired, the lead near the base of the bullet deforms and expands, causing it to be pressed right against the rifling. The bullet that has now formed itself to the barrel slides along, gaining the maximum benefit of the spin, as well as cleaning debris from any previous faulty loads by scraping the barrel.

The popularity of Breechloading arms, arms that opened up near the ignition at the base of the barrel, was dependent on the manufacturing precision of loading gates, and a way to distribute ammunition that could be loaded safely and efficiently through them. People looked to modify cartridge technology to see if there was a way that, rather than have the contents poured down the barrel, one could simply insert the cartridge into the breech. Cartridges were redesigned such that there was exposed powder at the edge, or chemically treated paper edges that could be ignited by flintlock or a more advanced ignition system called percussion that used more stable explosive caps rather than the hazardous powder primed pan. A milestone achievement was the creation of a bolt-action breechloader by Prussian Johann Nikolaus Dreyse in the early 1830s. There is some disagreement over the date, partially because he didn’t perfect a cartridge to go with his new rifle until later, and the Prussian army didn’t adopt it as a standard until 1840. The cartridge he developed contained an acorn-shaped bullet with a small charge of primer affixed to the base encased in paper along with a black powder charge.

Here is a detail of the bolt action. “Bolt” refers to the long hollow metal cylinder with a handle that moves it back and forth. The back of the bolt houses a needle that is powered by a spring. To load, you pulled back the bolt, inserted the cartridge, then pulled the bolt forward and rotated the handle to lock it into place. Depressing the trigger caused the needle to shoot forwards, through the powder and into the primer, igniting it, which ignited the charge. The Dreyse rifle, due to this construction was also called the “needle gun.”

The Dreyse rifle’s construction was problematic as maintenance was difficult, the firing pin was long and warped with frequent use. It’s location deeply recessed within the bolt made it hard to access the pin for replacement or repair, and again, a more refined cartridge that could be detonated with a shorter firing pin would solve this problem. Although rifle technology would eventually return to bolt-action, it didn’t do so in America for a long while.

American technology was, if you will pardon the expression, fully primed for the introduction of a modern efficient cartridge in 1857 after a confluence of technologies with the ingenuity of B. Tyler Henry, supervised by Oliver Winchester, the primary stockholder of the New Haven Arms Company. The lever action that replaced bolt action as the reloading method had been tried out before the Henry rifle with which it became inseparably associated. The action had been employed in a product of the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company designed by Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson, whose names you probably associate with revolvers more than rifles. The Volcanic rifle, an extra large version of their pistol design, used a “caseless” kind of ammunition; hollow based lead bullets with the base filled in with a volatile mercury fulminate charge. This ammunition was unstable and the fulminate charge was as successful in damaging the breech chamber as it was in propelling the bullet.

In fact, most of the design of the Henry rifle itself had its origins in patents issued more than ten years prior to its introduction. The lever-arm design had been patented by a Walter Hunt in 1849, and an advancement on it featuring a kind of spring loading patented by L. Jennings later that year. The Jennings rifle did not have cartridges that contained primer. Horace Smith also had an 1851 patent on a version of the lever action. Under the employment of Winchester, who acquired all of these patents, Henry’s development incorporated progress made in all of these stages. The other successful rifles in the market at the time were all single-shot, and the potential of a successful repeating rifle was untapped. Winchester found a cartridge to make his repeating rifles work the way they were supposed to both safely and reliably in the fertile mind of B. Tyler Henry. The Henry rimfire cartridge had a brass casing to direct the explosion of the 25 grain charge and protect the breech.

Incidentally, Smith and Wesson sold their rights to all their repeating arm manufacture due to another influential patent acquisition involving revolver design in 1855, and they focused exclusively on revolvers. This patent let them have a stranglehold on the production of successful revolvers, which is why you didn’t see other lines of revolvers until the patent expired. So they specialized into what they did best. As did the New Haven Arms Company, which discontinued all other lines of production and from 1860 on, produced only the Henry Rifle and the Ammunition.

[pic]

With this arm available, the tubular magazine below the barrel contained an additional 15 shots, each of which could be fired in quick succession, as fast as one could work the lever. Now if you missed your first or had multiple targets, you had quick access to more shots. This made it very useful in military applications, particularly for large batches of volley fire. Single shot rifles, however, did not disappear. The repeating rifle’s demands of stability and capacity resulted in the loss of some raw power and size of the ammunition. This resulted in a somewhat smaller effective range. For example the Sharps single-shot rifle that had been in introduced in the late 1840s fired a bullet that weighed 370 grains and had a powder charge of 80 grains. The repeater’s 216 grain bullet propelled by a 25 grain charge did not have the same lethal range. There was still room for improvement.

However, the basic look of the Winchester rifle didn’t change dramatically for the rest of the line of lever action repeaters, which continued production until the end of the century. In 1866, after the success of the Henry rifle, Winchester expanded and reorganized the New Haven Arms Company into the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and all subsequent revisions of the rifle, variants on the Henry, carried his name. The 1866 has an improvement in the loading mechanism that allowed the loading to take place from the side of the tubular magazine chamber rather than the front end, but it still made use of the .44 caliber cartridges designed by Henry, though Winchester introduced the flat-nosed design evolution. Winchester proceeded to acquire patents for competing rifle designs, including the Spencer rifle, a repeater with capability that could compete with the Henry.

Winchester Rifles Models, From Top Right: 1873, 1876, 1892, 1894

As Winchester devoured the competition, the above lines of rifles manufactured one after the other became the American image of the rifle. The 1873, the next major revision introduced an iron frame which lent it a sturdier feel than its bronze framed predecessors. However, again, the catalyst for major change was the development of an improved cartridge, this time the .44 WCF, the Winchester Center Fire. This ammunition (which was still manufactured and relatively widely used up through the first half of this century), carried 40 grains of powder in a cap inside a center fire brass shell. The center fire cartridges added both power and modularity. The modularity enabled what marketing terminology today would call the “end user” of the 1873 to replace a spent charge in a shell, and seat a new bullet, all using simple hand tools. Removing dependence on a factory for new ready ammunition increased the utility of the rifle tremendously. The 1873 would stay in production by the Winchester company until 1923, despite the introduction of newer, sleeker repeating rifles. The fascination with this particular Winchester extends to the present day, where an Italian company produces working replicas of the 1873 for enthusiasts who want the styling and feel of the period piece but the durability of modern materials.

Getting back to new developments in the Winchester line, the 1886 had a heavier interlocking system of blocks composing the loading mechanism, and was manufactured in several calibers. Notice I said developments in the Winchester line rather than Winchester’s development. I said this because the advancements in the design of the 1886 were the result of Winchester’s purchase of the business of the Browning Brothers in Utah in the early 1880’s. Now you may or may not have heard of John M. Browning, one of the Browning brothers, but this is not because John Browning didn’t do very much. In The Rifle in America, Philip Sharpe comments:

Browning was a peculiar sort of individual. He did not seem to be tremendously interested in over popularizing the name Browning and was ready to design and redesign continuously various types of arms which he manufactured under the name of other concerns. If his name appeared on the inventions of his manufacture, the name of John M. Browning would today be more widely known than that of Henry Ford.

You are probably more familiar with the names of Winchester, Remington, and Colt, gun manufacturers whose designs probably owe more to John Browning than any other individual. If you fought for the U.S. Army in either of the World Wars or the Korean War, you very probably know the name Browning, as the U.S. Government did decide to give Browning the credit he was due when he designed a gas powered automatic rifle for use in World War I. A war which, incidentally, was started with the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand by an automatic pistol which Browning also designed.

Returning to the 1886, and I believe returning finally to our hunter, the 1886 allowed safe use in a repeater of very heavy cartridges as would be required for hunting game at substantial range. Most hunting manuals, even today, suggest that you plan your aim as if you have only one shot. The game will move, and if you fire aimlessly in the general direction of your quarry, assuming that it will simply run into one of the bullets, you will miss. However, a single shot is not always enough to take down a deer or bear and you should fire a second, quick but calculated shot to make sure that you have succeeded. Take another three seconds to recover from the recoil of your first shot and properly set this one before firing again. Even with new cases, a repeating rifle allowed you to sight as you switched the shot. The time you saved with the 1886 often meant the difference between bagging a deer and watching a wounded deer run off, with you unable to trail it. Time, of course, leads us back to the clerk and his pocket watch, just on the other side of the rifle. The two outsiders, the clerk who marks the time of all the people working at the camp in hours, and the hunter whose day-to-day success is made or broken over seconds.

Bibliography

“Breechloading Rifles of the Civil War”

Color, Case “Uberti's Winchester 73: this fast firing repeater speaks with an Italian accent, and is mighty popular with the cowboy crowd.” Orig. in Guns Magazine, July 2002. Online at

“Repeating Rifle” Wikipedia.

Sharpe, Philip B. The Rifle in America. New York: William Morrow and Co. 1938

“Small Arms” Encyclopedia Brittanica 2001 (electronic edition)

Venturino, Mike. “Classic Cartridge Report: Shooting the .45-90 WCF” Shooting Times (online publication)

Various Winchester images taken from

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download